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Vestas cuts 110 Colorado jobs at Brighton, Windsor blade factories

By Mark JaffeThe Denver Post

Posted:
02/21/2013 09:10:18 AM MST

Updated:
02/22/2013 01:29:41 AM MST

Employees work on vortex generators at the Vestas Wind Systems blade factory in Windsor in 2011. The company announced it is cutting 110 jobs at its blade factories in Brighton and Windsor, reducing its Colorado workforce to about 1,000. (AAron Ontiveroz, Denver Post file)

Vestas Wind Systems — which operates four factories in Colorado employing 1,100 people — is cutting about 110 jobs from its blade factories in Windsor and Brighton.

Workers at the factories had been on a reduced 32-hour workweek; with the job cuts, the remaining employees will return to a 40-hour week, Aarhus, Denmark-based Vestas said in a statement.

The move comes in response to a drop in orders as the federal wind-production-tax credit, a key element in financing wind farms, was renewed in January for just one year, the company said.

Vestas knew the late timing of the federal production-tax credit, or PTC, extension, would result in a significant reduction in 2013 installations, the company said.

In this July 2010 photo, a Vestas employee walks past tower sections at the wind turbine manufacturing plant south of Pueblo. (Mike Sweeney, The Pueblo Chieftain via the Associated Press)

"It may take a few months for the PTC to take effect," said Peter Kelley, a spokesman for the American Wind Energy Association, an industry trade group.

"But the extension of the PTC doesn't solve all the problems," Kelley said. "We are still faced with the uncertainty and this start-stop cycle that is hard on manufacturers."

The tax credit is equal to $22 per megawatt that a new wind farm generates for the first 10 years.

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